Garage Band '08 crashing at startup

I can't figure this out. Nothing is working for me. All your suggestions sound great. I get all excited then nothing. idvd doesn't work now, garageband. I just going to carry this heavy *** computer to the Apple store and make them fix it all. This is complete BS having problems like this. I love my mac but dammit what good is it. Mine tells me the required software extension is missing along with other error messages. grrrrrrrrrrr

Ok,so what's the extension? What are the other error messages? It does seem to be trying to give you a pointer here, doesn't it...?

Gavin

Hello there ..
I too have now got problems .. I loaded GB 08 did all the up dates ... and all except GB open up and run well .. (all except iMovie .. my G4 MDD is not up to speed, so they say ???) .. anyway .. besides that .. GB .. Mmmm ??
I did all of what is recommended here .. spend hours, same as other people have trying to fix a problem that no one wants .. it cost money and time and down time .. so who is responsible . certainly not any of us .. we buy a product in good faith that they (programers) know what they are doing ..
There must be a common flaw in the whole thing somewhere ...
As I said .. I did the whole lot as suggested and found fonts are the problem .. user/ */Libary/fonts .. but .. i have 3000 odd fonts and when I gave up trying .. more than 150 were faulted .. but .. my desk top started to loose clock, names from files and letters from titles .. so I put them all back .. and GB is back to square one ..
Just like to say .. Thanks Apple .. for making great computers (Mac's) like these in the same class as a Windows PC .. so how about lifting your game .. step up to the plate and get it going right again ..
Thats what I thought the Apple Mac was about .. not an exspensive WINDOWS CLONE PC
To everyone else .. hang in there .. I know I have to
Any suggestion welcome
Cheers
Mark

I finally got my GarageBand working. Thanks for your hints!

I don't know why, but simply moving the ≈/Library/Fonts folder out of the home directory didn't work for me. I had to move them to another hard disk.


So, the sequence that worked for me, was:


1) Copy all the fonts from your home directory's Fonts folder to another disk.

2) Delete all the fonts in your home directory's Fonts folder.

3) Clear the caches: simply delete everything under ≈/Library/Caches - or use some handy helper app for this. I used Maintenance, http://www.destinyofshadow.com/blog/

4) Restart. (In theory, logging out and back in should work too.)


As someone already suspected, the problem probably wasn't caused by some specific font, but just the sheer number of fonts. I had over 7000 installed. (Removing the broken fonts didn't work, either.)

I'm not even trying to understand why I had to move the fonts to an external disk to make the removal effective. Doesn't make sense to me. But anyways, that did the trick. Simply moving the Fonts folder to the desktop didn't.

I hope this helps.

I have a G5 with plenty of RAM and hard disk space. I tried the permissions and so on with no luck. I then tried the font idea and it worked. I have not moved any of the fonts back yet so I will see what happens. I did run a validate on all of the fonts and nothing showed up with a problem. But at least the Garage Band issue has been solved.

Great work.

So far the only one of suggestions offered that worked for me is completely removing fonts from the home directory Font Folder to, well, somewhere else. So my question here has more to do with font management, I guess. Much like days of yore when you didn't want to bog-down your system 7,8 or 9 by having too many fonts in your System Folder, isn't it a bad thing to have too many fonts active in your home directory in OS X? If one has 2000, 3000, 7000, or more fonts have them sitting somewhere else anyway awaiting activation by a Suitcase or FontExplorer or what-have-you?

This, mind you, is not meant to let Apple off the hook for this nonsense. I find it absurd that Garage Band should be inoperable because of a conflict with fonts, for gods' sake. Come on Apple. Give us a fix!

alan b

I believe it IS the number of fonts... Once I got the amount under 1000 it works... I used font book to keep track of the number and to remove any duplicates I may installed over the years.

Hope this helps someone.

It is the number of fonts.

Simply disable the user fonts from fontbook before launching GB.

Well I don't know about you all, but I just got the update for iLife components--incl. GB, of course--via Software Update, and now GB is starting up all nice and proper-like. Didn't remove any of my 3000 fonts or anything.

You don't supposed they fixed it do you?